Mine
16 .
2000 ’ J u s t M ft. 5 3
BOOKS
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t r i a n u l e jjgj
T he S truggle for
H appiness
By Ruthann Robson.
St. Martin’s Press, 2000;
$22.95 hardcover.
uthann Robson is a
woman of many
dimensions: a
lawyer, a scholar and
a consistently won
derful lesbian liter
ary writer of many
genres. Best known
for her most recent
suspense novel,
ajk/a, Robson has
also mastered
poetry, nonfic
tion and short
stories.
In her new
book of short
stories, The
Struggle for
Happiness,
Robson’s characters
reflect her own multidimensionality
and deep knowledge of everything from law
and nature to ballet and utopian philosophy.
In each story, Robson locates her characters
within the landscape of the contemporary les
bian nation. A security guard, lawyer, animal
rights activist, singer, teen-ager, and Russian
ballet teacher are a few of the many colorful
and emotionally complex women Robson
paints. Each is, in fact, engaged in her own
struggle for happiness, juggling the demands of
careers, lovers, friends and family.
In the opening story, “Black Squirrels,” a
woman negotiates a debilitating illness and the
loss of a lover against the backdrop of environ
mental devastation in her neighborhood. In
“Women’s Music,” a guitarist’s supposedly dead
lover shows up at one of her concerts. And in
“pas de deux,” a young dance student blossoms
into adulthood as a dance teacher but never
stops looking for the older teacher who shaped
both her career and her lesbian desire.
The final and longest story in the collec
tion, “Close to Utopia," links the themes of the
previous stories— loss and change; women’s
relationship to the environment; how identity
is shaped by work, love and family— but
departs from them stylistically. Robson experi
ments with language here, borrowing styles and
ideas from New French Feminists such as
Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigary.
While building an intriguing story of three
American women who steal a wolf from an
animal shelter and deliver it to a group of
French, Asian and Caribbean-Canadian
women who live and work on the Canadian
tundra releasing wolves back into
the wild, Robson asks us
to meditate on women’s
relationship to language
and our closeness to and
distance from the wild. One
character has spent 30 years
conjugating the French verb
être (to be) yet still wrestles
with her own sense of who
and what she is.
Like ajkja, The Struggle for
Happiness delivers masterful sto
rytelling wrapped in lyrical, yet
economical, language. Robson
seems to get better and better
with each book. Let’s just hope
she doesn’t wait too long before
offering us another excellent and
challenging read.
— Catherine Sameh
R
R avelstein
By Saul Bellow.
Viking, 2000;
$24.95 hard -
cover.
avelstein, the
new novel by
venerable No
bel Prize-winning
writer Saul Bellow,
follows a plot similar
to his 1975 novel
Humboldt’s Gift. A
gentle, troubled
writer— obviously a
fictional stand-in for
Bellow himself, here
called Chick— aids a
brilliant but eccentric
mentor during a time of
crisis.
In Ravelstein, said
mentor is gay university
professor Abe Ravelstein, a
globe-hopping, world-
renowned genius who’s
dying of AIDS.
Bellow has a gift for
bringing objectivity to his characters and their
situations through sheer volume of description
and detail; we’re given every nuance of a char
acter’s attitudes, opinions and tastes in every
thing from literature to clothes to composers.
His depiction of Ravelstein as gloriously
flawed— emotionally undemonstrative, greedy
for life and all material things, genteel and elit
ist, socially hierarchical, stubbornly resistant to
touchy-feely liberal humanism— is affectionate
and charming.
Bellow almost abandons his admirable fair
ness when dealing with Chick’s ex-wife (who,
without the author’s bestowal of individuality
and idiosyncrasy, would be merely the cold,
career-driven woman of stereotypical male
chauvinist nightmares), but he manages to
avoid sinking to outright misogyny.
Somehow, in just over 200 pages— less than
half of his typical length— Bellow is able to use
every tool in his vast, learned mind to bring
morality, mortality, love, philosophy and histo
ry to bear on Chick and Abe’s friendship,
resulting in an almost too rich aggregation of
real, empathetic humanity. The souls populat
ing Ravelstein are immediately recognizable as
human, their trials and triumphs engaging,
their doubts and hopes profound.
— Christopher McQuain
gay
bible?
paúl rudnick’s [jeflrey/in & out]
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T he S ilk R oad
By Jane Summer. Alyson Books, 2000;
$12.95 softcover.
fter reading the first chap
ter of Jane Summer’s first
novel, I was hopeful. It
seemed as if she had set up
an interesting structure for a
coming-of-age dyke tale: an
omniscient narrator
instilled with a cynical
view of 1970s white-bread
America.
The narration is frag
mented with random,
vivid details of the town,
hell, New York and a
boyish, pubescent girl
named Paige Bergman.
The first chapter feels
like a time bomb
A
Continued on Page 55
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